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“You Here for the Oculus Gang Bang, Too?” the Reality of Virtual-Reality Porn Is Overhyped and Unsexy

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“You Here for the Oculus Gang Bang, Too?” the Reality of Virtual-Reality Porn Is Overhyped and Unsexy “You Here for the Oculus Gang Bang, Too?” The reality of virtual-reality porn is overhyped and unsexy. So you’re stuck having sex with humans for a little while longer. By Ryan Bradley Illustrations by Miguel Jiron It’s a strap-on, that headset. No two ways around it. A blindfold, too. With headphones, if you really want to do this right. Now, throw in some kind of artificial orifice, like a Fleshlight, or some other newfangled creation in the burgeoning field of teledildonics, and ask yourself: How does it feel? Amazing? The porn industry imagines that it does, just as it imagines you, deaf and blind and draped in technology, are excited, even turned on. That’s the hope, anyway, when Brian Shuster, the CEO of Utherverse, delivers his “visionary keynote” to XBiz 360, a conference that bills itself as “the online adult industry’s top trade event.” We are in the Andaz West Hollywood, on the Sunset Strip, when Shuster says he believes virtual reality is the inevitable future of pornography. This is not a surprise. Porn is an industry not unlike any other in media, in that free content has eroded the business model from within. Utherverse creates online 3-D virtual worlds where a user’s avatar can meet and have sex with other users, or pliant bots, in a variety of sexy, rendered venues. An X-rated Second Life, basically. The most popular of Shuster’s domains is redlightcenter.com. He has been pouring money into making his virtual kingdoms ready for the second coming, which is VR. Tomorrow he and his team will be hosting a small virtual demo of one such world on the Oculus Rift. So, VR it is, or will be, or might be. Who knows!? It’s the future, anyway. I was eager to see what Shuster’s futuresex visions looked like, just as I was surprised he was actually going to show the demo. I had spent the past four months listening to people tell me how exciting it would be, to exist in this fantasy world of virtual sex with anyone or anything imaginable. And yet trying to glimpse some form of this VR porn had led me to a distant edge of Los Angeles County with a distinct sense that I was unwanted and had, perhaps, fallen for an elaborate form of X-rated hucksterism. My search for the future started quite hopefully, with a company called SugarDVD, which is like Netflix, but for porn. The company announced it was working on a “choose your own adventure”-like first-person virtual experience for the Oculus Rift. A spokesperson for SugarDVD named Rebecca Bolen wrote on the company’s website that they had a demo and were looking for volunteers. When I called her, Bolen told me the company’s engineers were not simply working on an erotic experience unlike any the world had seen, but were talking about what to build off it that would change the very way people thought about sex. “We’ve been doing social media longer than anyone,” Bolen said. “When you think about it, what’s more social than sex?” I said I wasn’t sure. Before she hung up, she told me how she’d be talking to the team, the CEO and developers, and would set up a time for me to come in and chat, see what they were up to, maybe sit in on one of those meetings where they discussed and planned out the future. Weeks passed, then a month, then Bolen’s emails began bouncing back, then she appeared again, but only to set up a meeting, then push it back, then cancel it. Eventually I determined that the best course of action was to just show up at the SugarDVD headquarters. SugarDVD is one of a suite of companies owned by Oddesse, which has its offices in Chatsworth, in the northwestern-most corner of the San Fernando Valley, where the suburban development peters out at the foothills of the Santa Susanas, crude hills pockmarked with sandstone boulders and rattlers, probably. The office itself was a low-slung cinderblock structure, unmarked and unremarkable. I pressed the buzzer and waited. A man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt opened the door. I said I was here to see Rebecca Bolen. “Do you have a meeting?” he asked. “Kind of,” I said. Then added, “Just tell her Ryan Bradley is here to see her.” But when he went to close the door, I made a move, wanting to wait inside. It was hot out, and relentlessly bright. “No,” he said, “You need to wait here.” A minute passed and then suddenly I saw a woman rush down the stairs and, in what seemed like one fluid motion, move from the last step to opening the door. “Ryan?” she said. “Rebecca?” I said. “Oh, I don’t think any of our engineers are available to talk to you right now!” she said. She was extremely pale and had very red hair and a matching red leather jacket. She let me in. We talked for an hour in a large break room. There was very little about the décor to suggest this was the headquarters of a vast adult entertainment empire. Behind me, on the bookshelf, I noted Jack Welch’s Jack, a Murdoch biography, and Stori Telling by Tori Spelling. Bolen apologized for the disappearing act. They had been very busy updating their streaming service app, she told me, so that it could tailor content even more specifically to users’ desires. “So that, if you hate big butts and you cannot lie, you will literally never see a big butt in any of the videos. Sometimes it will even be pixelated out.” She repeated a line she had told me before, when we were talking on the phone, about how SugarDVD was more of a tech company than a porn company. This seemed very important to her. At one point a little robot on wheels careened into the room, pivoted, and shined a green light at us. “Oh, that’s our droid,” she said. The droid backed out of the room and, in the hallway, proceeded to do a series of spectacularly high hops as Bolen continued talking. Eventually we started talking about the company’s progress in VR, which was…not far? It was slow going. They had just scanned one of “the girls,” a star named Alex Chance, and were going to scan a few more. The scanning process was as simple as getting the star to stand in the middle of a room while cameras moved around her, then stitching the images together, on a computer, and replicating her body virtually. As for the demo itself, they were “exploring options” like changing a star’s hair color, but what sort of “action” would be available was still a mystery. At the end of our meeting Bolen took me in to see SugarDVD’s CEO, Jax. Jax Smith. A pretty good porn name. Stocky fellow with something between a close-cropped beard and extravagant stubble, loose fitting black deep-cut V-neck T-shirt, big biceps. We said very little to each other but shook hands long enough for him to squeeze just a little too hard and stare just a little too long, imparting to me that he knew what I was doing, and that I wasn’t invited. I squeezed his hand back and tried without words to say something like “Yes, I am not supposed to be here, we are not supposed to be having this uncomfortable moment together, you and I. Nonetheless I am learning all kinds of interesting things about your technology company.” Then I smiled wide and told him this all seemed really exciting and I couldn’t wait to set up a time for us to have a longer chat. “Sure, sure,” he said. Then Bolen led me out, and I was never invited back. (Months and months later, Bolen told Matter that SugarDVD’s virtual sex demo was canned, that the company is “pursuing the options” but that “the technology was moving very quickly and we had to put the project on hold until we could gather more resources to pursue VR options.”) The Andaz West Hollywood — host to Xbiz 360 — was once, not so long ago, the Continental Hyatt House, also known as the Riot House, a place made famous by the rock stars who stayed there and trashed it (Zeppelin, the Stones, Bowie — though Bowie didn’t, apparently, toss his rooms quite so aggressively). “Today,” a placard inside the Andaz reads, “the hotel appears on almost every reality show on TV.” The Andaz’s Panorama Penthouse is filled with men, mostly middle-aged, mostly in advanced stages of hair loss, who appear to have never considered nor touched the top three buttons of their shirts. All are wearing a white lanyard with the words “exoClick” printed on either side, repeatedly. Attached to the lanyard is a badge with the attendee’s name and the company he works for. Every other square inch is filled with advertising — for adultfriendfinder.com, cams.com, alt.com, penthouse.com, and Out Personals. The walls of the Andaz are covered with ads, too. As are the elevator doors (both sides), floors (carpeted and otherwise), and hallways (which are lined with banners that both rise from the floor and come draped from the ceiling). The penthouse conference room has advertisements behind the stage and to either side. “They really sold the shit out of this place, didn’t they?” one speaker announced, with wonder.
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